And the lions shall lie down with the lambs, and there shall be good eatin’ for the lions.

I am not one who believes that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim or Trotskyite just waiting to fling open the republic’s gates to let the barbarians in, nor have I seen credible evidence that a significant percentage of the population ever really did. On the other hand, the significant percentage of the population wearing those creepy cultish idol-worshipping shirts will find the feet of clay in due course.  I do believe that within the next several years — the number depending on how much aid we provide — the North Korean system will collapse for its own reasons and China will end up dominating what’s left.  But in an effort to prevent that, Secretary of State “Kim Jong Bill” Richardson will offer to lend them some AP and Washington Post journalists to help school a new generation of North Koreans in the practice of shameless, toadying cult-raising adulation.  They certainly perfected it this year.  I regret that I have no subscriptions to cancel.  To hear some of them, the heavens will rain manna, loaves and fishes will appear in every mailbox each morning, and pixie fairies will be waiting in our offices to pleasure us under our desks.

Some of us are going to be very disappointed when we realize that these were, after all, the droids we were looking for.

All that being said, I believe Barack Obama is a good man, of unquestionably high intelligence, who performed very credibly in the debates, and who I hope makes a great president.  I hope — that word again — but also tend to doubt, that his very election will help heal some of our racial discord here.  And like just about everyone, I like him, which is good, because I’ll be spared the use of heart medication I’d have needed if I had to watch such detestable alternatives as a John Kerry or Hillary Clinton presidency.  (I suspect “Secretary of State Richardson” will eventually have me swallowing nitro pills.)   It’s also good that Obama’s likeability probably reflects that he’s a good man, but I fear that it’s an easy likability that’s often the companion of shallowness, of comfort with all views that applies judgment to none of them.  I fear that he is just the sort of good man to do nothing while evil triumphs.  That is why Obama’s associations worry me.  How he will deal with evil in a world so filled with it, when he can’t even manage to distance itself from it?

Voters and cellmates alike must accommodate themselves of what is foregone, of course.  The people have spoken (though there was no groundswell, and more against Bush and the economic meltdown on his watch than for Obama, I suspect — “change” is a skillfully positive spin to put on a campaign that was fundamentally negative and focused toward a guy who wasn’t even running).  As I see it, either Obama performs magnificently and we’ll all be just fine or he won’t, and the pendulum will swing back in two, four, and/or six years.  Even eight years isn’t enough time to bring a spacious and productive country to ruin.  And how much worse could he be than Bush?  Would, say, Mike Huckabee have been any better?  Really, with the lone exception of his steadfast-yet-bumbling efforts in Iraq, there is a nearly unanimous absence of praise for Bush’s foreign policy.  On Iran and North Korea, particularly, he seems to have made a studied decision to pass the problems along to his successors without achieving real or meaningful disarmament.  We’ll never know whether McCain would have been much different in practice.  But the thing Bush and McCain had going for them was that they could scare the right people.

It’s worrying — isn’t it? — to recognize what even Joe Biden did in an unguarded moment:  that the predators of our world will want to “test” a president who at least seems young, naive, unschooled, and weak.  If they’re right about him, it will soon be high season for global predation, and if they’re not, then we may be headed toward a series of very dangerous miscalculations.  If Obama fumbles the first of these tests, that series will be extended.  Here is just a short list of what I fear we may now face:

• I am convinced that Iran will test a nuclear weapon in the next four years.  No credit goes to Bush in setting Obama up for success here, and I predict that neither the United States, the U.N., or the EU will do anything effective to prevent or react to it.  The oil-rich states of the Gulf will cower in passive horror before adjusting to the new reality of Iranian hegemony.  Suddenly, hostilities between Iran and Israel seem likely.  This would be a good time to really focus on those alternative fuels.

• If, as seems likely, China’s economy turns sharply downward and there is unemployment and discontent, its government will look for a convenient outlet for more of the “patriotic” harrumphing that served it so well against the Tibetans and during the Olympics.  I predict that Taiwan will be that outlet, and I also predict that everyone will come to the sudden realization that neither America nor Taiwan is really committed to Taiwan’s defense.  I don’t think China will go so far as to invade, but it may do something that’s more than a large naval exercise and as much as a blockade.  The result could well be one more morsel digested into the bottomless maw of one country / two systems.  This will rightly be pronounced as an important and alarming global power shift.  It will mark the beginning of a new Cold War.

• North Korea will declare itself ready for a “new beginning” in its relations with America, which will amount to nothing more than an invitation to renegotiate past agreements in North Korea’s favor, loading them with more benefits for its loathesome regime, and erasing any prospect — to the extent any remains at all — of disarming North Korea at all.  If you need any more evidence to believe that AF 2.0 is a dead letter, then here’s the latest:  North Korea has reneged on allowing international monitors to take soil and nuclear waste samples, even at Yongbyon.  Nonetheless, Bush has given Kim Jong Bill the necessary cover to seek engagement and agreement at the absolute sacrifice of our interests and our values (and how I hope I am wrong about this).  The North Koreans will demand, and may well get, the establishment of a U.S. interests section in Pyongyang, expanded trade benefits for its military-industrial complex, and aid with few strings attached.  If Obama gets a second term, we’ll put an embassy in Pyongyang before it ends, death camps and selective starvation be damned.  The North Korean regime also continue to try to isolate South Korea, which may well hedge its bets by continuing to move toward China.

• But in the end, North Korea’s regime will collapse on its own, an event that may come sooner if His Porcine Majesty’s gargantuan cranium continues to sputter and clot like a rice cooker with a bouffant.

• Things will get worse — much worse — in Afghanistan, in part because of trends that have been in the making for years.  We will learn, as Boris Gromov learned years ago, that foreign powers can’t dominate Afghanistan simply by flooding it with foreign troops (as opposed to pressing a focused military effort that defends the population, and which creates space for tribal micro-diplomacy and economic development).  We will also learn the practical value of European good will — bupkes — when NATO continues its failure to contribute meaningfully to the war effort there, and when the same crowds who turned up to cheer Obama in Berlin denounce him as an imperialist for not withdrawing from Afghanistan.  The same critics on the left who declared the war in Iraq lost years ago and who call Afghanistan a necessary war today will be ready to declare Afghanistan lost and a war of choice within two years.  They will do this not because winning the war isn’t necessary, but because winning the war will be hard and unpopular.

• There will be a major crisis between Russia and Ukraine, possibly ending with the seizure of Sevastopol.  NATO will do nothing, and that will be the effective end of NATO.

• Iraq, however, now seems likely to survive a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces.  Neither Al Qaeda nor the Shiite militias now seems to be a real threat to the central government, whose army is over half a million strong and battle-hardened.  Clearly, they have much to learn about logistics, command, and control, and sectarian differences remain, but even Obama is saying that we’ll leave behind enough advisors to make the Iraqi security forces self sufficient, along with enough special ops to take on any concentrations of terrorists.  (If Obama doesn’t want images of Iraq reverting to chaos on our TV screens just before the next mid-term election, the Code Pink crowd is in for a big disappointment, and the far left will turn on him.)   I suspect we’re rapidly approaching the point where the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil does the central government more political harm than military good.  We will be able to leave Iraq with our key national security objectives achieved — Saddam and the potential WMD threat removed, Al Qaeda defeated, and the establishment of a stable government at peace with its neighbors.  But the system that stablizes there, though it will be more benign than anything in its recent history, won’t be democracy as we know it, and that doesn’t portend well for the region’s long-term future (but what does?).

• Pakistan — take your own guess there.  This is the least predicatable and scariest situation of all.

Much of this is admittedly unfair, because much of it is based on perceptions of thugs and tyrants that may themselves be unfair.  We’ll soon know if they’re right.  If they are, plenty of voters may soom realize that a strong foreign policy isn’t such a burdensome thing after all.